The Effects Of Metacognitive Strategy Training On English Reading Comprehension In Rural Junior High School’s Students

At the end of1970s, the psychologist Flavell put forward the concept of metacognition.Since then, a great number of language researchers have paid attention to this theory. Theseresearchers improved the concept of metacognition and other related theories andexperimental researches. Meanwhile, some researchers paid more attention to metacognitionin reading comprehension. In recent years, there are more and more researches about thefeasibility of metacognitive reading strategies training in English and the role of theoreticaldiscussion. In these studies, however, there are quite a few empirical researches about whetherthis teaching method can really improve the students’ English reading ability, especially thereare few researches about junior high school students in rural areas as the research subjects.So on basis of above, this research is designed and attempts to find answers to thefollowing research questions:1. Can metacognitive strategy training improve students’ reading ability in rural juniorhigh schools?2. Can metacognitive strategy training improve students’ awareness of metacognitivestrategy?3. Assume there are some differences between the effective readers and ineffectivereaders on metacognitive strategies in reading, what are they?In the current research, the effect of the metacognitive strategy training in reading isexplored. The subjects in the present study come from two natural classes, Grade Eight, inZhourui Experimental School with total number of80, in which one class is randomly chosenas the experimental goup and the other one as the CG. The experiment was firstly carried outby a questionnaire, which includes these four sub-categories of planning, selective attention,monitoring and evaluation, to find out the applying state of metacognitive reading strategiesawareness in rural junior high school. And the questionnaire result turned out that the currentsituation of metacognitive reading strategies awareness in rural junior high students is in themedium level. Then the researcher had an English reading comprehension exam for them as apre-test, the means of the pre-test in EG is22.25(44.5%of the total score) and in CG is 22.30(44.6%of the total score), which shows that their reading performance is similar andare both not low. Thus, the researcher designed an eight-week metacognitive strategy trainingin reading to the EG. After that, both the EG and CG took the post-test to check whether thetraining does work or doesn’t work on their reading performance and the EG took thepost-questionnaire. A follow-up semi-structured interview was conducted, ten students werechosen as the interviewees, five were effective readers who were doing well in their readingtests and five were ineffective readers who were doing bad.Several main outcomes are obtained as follows. First, the reading performance of theexperimental group, compared with the CG, is significance improved. Second, metacognitivestrategy training does improve students’ awareness of metacognitive strategy, and theeffective readers are advanced than the ineffective readers in all three aspects: metacognitiveknowledge, metacognitive experience and metacognive supervision. Hence, the currentresearch implies that metacognitive reading strategies training not only promotes students’reading performance, but also crucial to develop students’ metacognitive strategies awareness.Although the study has some limitations such as the time span and research design, somesuggestions are provided for vocabulary teaching and learning.